by Sharon Shinn
* * *
* * *
In the morning, he rose, dressed, and headed for the lab as if he had been doing just that without interruption for the past two weeks. He had no idea what he would say to Pakt. He had no idea if there was still a job awaiting him. He could not imagine how he would explain his absence or return. He just could think of nothing else to do instead.
He arrived early, the first one there except for Pakt himself. Taking a deep breath, Nolan traversed the hall, knocked on the guldman’s door, and entered.
Pakt, who was seated at his desk poring over papers, looked up and then grew motionless. Nolan waited a moment for a greeting and then said, “Good morning.”
“I’d been wondering if you were still alive,” Pakt said in a neutral voice.
“I left you a note.”
“Not a very helpful one. Not too specific about dates and causes.”
“I wasn’t too sure about dates myself.”
“And causes?”
Nolan raised his hands as if they would help him shape the words, then dropped them and gave his shoulders an infinitesimal shrug. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to talk about the causes.”
Pakt leaned back in his chair and gestured Nolan to a seat. “Problems with Leesa?” he asked gently.
Nolan sat on the edge of the chair, arms on his knees, hands clasped before him. “Well,” he said slowly, “ultimately I guess it will come down to that.”
“I went by your apartment a week ago,” Pakt said. “But no one was there. No one had seen you.”
“I’ve been gone,” Nolan said.
“Let me know when you can talk about it,” the guldman said.
Nolan looked over at him. “You’re the only one I think I could talk to about it,” he said. “But I’m not sure—even you—” He let the words trail off.
“So. Are you back?”
“I’m back,” Nolan said. “If you still want me here.”
“We’ve all missed you.”
“What did you tell them? Cerisa and the others?”
“That you were having family problems. I pretended I knew something. I don’t think anyone will ask too many questions.”
Nolan rose to his feet because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Well. Thanks for that.”
Pakt stood, too, concern crossing his face. “Are you all right?” he asked with some urgency. “You look like you’re sick.”
Nolan felt a hollow laugh whuffle through his cheeks. “That would be ironic,” he said. “No, I’m fine. Is there something on my desk for me to do? Or should I go back to old projects?”
Pakt was frowning, looking even less reassured as the conversation progressed. “Old projects for now, I guess,” he said. “I’ll let you know if something new comes in.”
Nolan nodded and left his office.
It was midmorning before anyone came in to check on him, although he knew the others were all aware of his return. He could catch their voices in the hallway: “Nolan’s back!” “Did you see? Nolan’s in his office.” “Where’s he been?” “What did Pakt say?” “Hey, was that Nolan?” It was standard lab procedure to try to determine what was happening through indirect methods (gossip) before proceeding to more direct approaches (interrogation), so Nolan was not surprised at the whispering. In fact, it comforted him a little. Made him feel at home.
When he had been working at his computer for a little more than two hours, there was a knock on his door, and Melina entered. “Hey, Nolan, good to see you,” she said with studied breeziness.
He swiveled in his chair to smile at her. She had been letting her hair grow, and now it stood up in tufted spikes all over head. There was nothing she could do to make herself look unattractive; in fact, the coiffure gave her a waifish charm that was quite appealing.
“Good to see you, too,” he replied, and meant it. “What’s been going on here?”
She leaned against the doorway. “Well, let’s see. Varella’s betrothed.”
“She is! To Roven?”
“No, it’s such a shock. Someone she met in the city. He’s a high-caste man, so no problem there, but not someone her mother approves of. It’s kind of been a scandal, and I think her grandmother’s threatening to divert her inheritance.”
“That would be pretty severe.”
“She says she doesn’t care. Says she’s going to live in the city the rest of her life, anyway. And her fiancée is a doctor over at the East Side hospital, so between them they ought to be fine in terms of income. But what a surprise, huh? Varella never seemed like much of a rebel to me.”
“You’re just jealous because you didn’t think of it first,” Nolan scoffed. “Refusing the man your family had picked out for you.”
She smiled and squirmed against the hard doorframe to achieve better comfort. “I did do it, but I was seventeen, and they’ve been afraid to matchmake for me ever since,” she retorted. “Now they’re waiting for me to get over my infatuation with Julitta before they introduce me to eligible men.”
“I think you should follow Varella’s lead and find your own man.”
“Maybe I would,” she said softly, “if I could figure men out.”
Nolan assumed that was a veiled reference to his own behavior and decided to change the subject. “Any other news? How’s Cerisa?”
“Like you care.”
“Just curious.”
“She’s been gone a lot. Speculation is that Ariana Bayless is considering reconfiguring the Biolab and Cerisa’s been there a lot advising her. That, or they’re involved in some torrid affair, because they are together all the time.”
“I could see that. Cerisa Daylen and Ariana Bayless.”
“Anyway, she hasn’t been around much, which of course has made the rest of us just as happy as bugs in the springtime. Hiram thinks maybe she’s considering resigning, but Pakt says that won’t happen till the world ends. But we talk about it a lot.”
“That would make her happy.”
“So what about you?” she asked. “You okay?”
“Okay.”
“Don’t want to talk about it, I guess.”
“Not really.”
“Would you want to have lunch, though? You cannot talk about it while we eat.”
“That sounds good. I’m hungry already.”
Over the meal, she filled him in on other small events that had transpired in his absence. As she spoke, the world began to resume some of its normal shades and contours; it was as if, with her words and details, she applied color and depth onto his flat, gray perspective. Now and then she would mention the name of someone whose existence he had literally forgotten, and he would reinsert that person into his interior landscape, until gradually it became populated and lively again. Sometimes he became so engrossed in remembering these newfound friends that he missed a few of her next sentences.
“I’m supposed to go to my mother’s this summer, in fact, for at least a month,” she was saying once when he fugued back in to the conversation. “Coleta Templeton—you remember the Templetons?—is introducing her youngest daughter at a birthday ball, and my mother is just adamant that I return for it. And of course the summer is the high social season at my mother’s house, because that’s when we celebrate her birthday, and my grandmother’s birthday, and my birthday, and so I know if I once set foot in-country, I won’t get away for weeks.”
“Will Julitta go with you?” Nolan asked.
Melina sipped her drink and looked quizzical. They had been gone from the lab for nearly ninety minutes, and she showed no signs of wanting to return. Nolan assumed she had cleared this all with Pakt (“I’ll take him out to lunch and see how he’s doing”), so he had not bothered to glance at his watch since they sat down.
“Julitta wants to go, and my mother has invited her, but I don�
��t think I’m really supposed to bring her,” Melina said at last with the air of one making a confession. “I think I’m supposed to be meeting Steffel Templeton and Ronan Baner. I think my mother wants to parade the candidates before me, and that would be a little harder to do with a jahla at my side.”
“So,” said Nolan, toying with his silverware, “in fact the infatuation has already waned.”
“No,” Melina said seriously. “No. Every time I think to myself, ‘I’m going to have to give this woman up sometime,’ I feel my heart stop. I find myself bargaining for more time. I tell myself, ‘Another year. I won’t even think about it until next spring. Next summer. Next fall.’ I don’t know what I’ll do when it actually comes down to it. When I have to marry and move on.”
“Then don’t do it,” Nolan said.
Melina spread her hands. On her face was a hurt smile. “I’m the oldest daughter. I owe my family something—I owe them everything. What else can I do?”
Nolan rose to his feet, too filled with a sudden rush of restless energy to sit quietly for another moment. “Let the land pass to a younger sister or a cousin or a niece. Let it fall into fallow ruin. What will it matter? Don’t let them marry you off to some stupid clod just to get yourself a daughter. How can you turn your back on love? If you had ever had it once and let it go, you wouldn’t even be able to talk about it now.”
She gaped up at him, seeming too stunned to move. “You’ve broken your engagement with Leesa,” she said.
He had turned to go, so he answered her over his shoulder. “Leesa,” he said, “is the least of my heartaches right now.” And he walked out of the restaurant without even glancing back to see if she would follow.
* * *
* * *
The next two weeks passed at an almost languorous pace. Nolan was aware of the unfolding of each minute, second by second. He watched time array itself before him as he would have watched the blooming of a flower through stop-motion photography. Small events jogged his memory, reminded him how it felt to be human, and indigo: This was the exact scent of summer asphalt in the city; this was the precise taste of homemade holiday bread. It was as if all these details had been wiped away by the invasion of the gulden lifestyle, and now his brain and his body had to relearn their most basic components.
But none of the recovered knowledge erased what he had acquired on Gold Mountain. The two sets of memories coexisted, side by side and antithetical; he could not make them meet inside his head. He was like a planet circling a single sun, so that only half of his surfaces were illuminated at any one time. But nightfall did not obliterate one nor daylight make the other paramount. He watched the revolving scenery in his mind and wondered when he would succumb to madness.
He tried over and over to plan a trip to Inrhio, but he could not bring himself to make the travel reservations. It was not that he was afraid to see Leesa, wracked with worry over the pain he would inflict on a kind and innocent soul—he should have been, but he was not. What held him back was this surreal lassitude, this inability to fully function, this strange detachment that, despite his best efforts, allowed him to slip weightlessly through his own life. And yet it was unfair to Leesa to fail to tell her how signally her life had changed. Even in his dreamy state, he recognized that.
She forced the issue by arriving in the city one evening only twelve hours after she had alerted him that she was coming. “I’ve taken a hotel for the first two nights, because I have no idea what you’ve planned these days,” her note informed him. “If you’re free, come to me this evening. If not, send me a note. Can’t wait to see you.”
So he dutifully presented himself at her room as soon as he finished work for the day. She seemed pleased to see him, but preoccupied. She had come to the city on business, and not all her transactions had proceeded smoothly.
“I’ll have to run these figures by mother, because she’s much better at numbers than I am, but I don’t think this is the yield we were expecting,” she told Nolan, still frowning down at some papers. She was dressed in a flowing summer frock of froth and aqua, and she looked like some sea goddess who had drifted in on the evening tide. Nolan could not help thinking how beautiful she looked, but the thought was distant; it chimed in his head like some faraway bell.
Eventually she laid the papers aside and smiled at him across the room. She was seated behind the massive, impersonal desk. He had draped himself across a flowered sofa. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in so long, and here I am going on about unimportant things. How have you been? I’ve heard practically nothing from you this past month or so.”
“Busy,” he said. “Odd things have been happening.”
She crossed the room to come sit in the chair beside him. She took his hand and held it on her lap. “What odd things?”
He shook his head. He had never, with all his mental preparation, come up with a good lie to tell Leesa. “Among other things, I’ve been thinking over what’s going to happen in my future.”
She smiled again and squeezed his fingers. “Silly. Your future is marrying me and living in a beautiful house and having marvelous daughters. They’ll have my face and your brains, and everyone will adore them.”
“I wish that were so,” he said seriously.
“Why wouldn’t it be? I know we’ve waited a while to marry, but we’re still young enough to have children. As many children as we want.”
Nolan sat up in his chair, and his strange detachment took this moment to fall away. Suddenly, everything seemed hyper-real—every distinct color in the room, every individual bone in the hand that held onto his, every breath he painfully drew into his lungs. “I don’t think so,” he said in a low, firm voice. “I don’t think that is the future I want after all.”
Leesa’s dark eyes grew darker, shadowed from within by sudden doubts. “Then—what is it you do want? You’ve never mentioned any other plans. And we’ve talked about this often enough.”
“Sometimes, I think you don’t realize how important my work is to me,” he said. “Sometimes I haven’t realized it myself. I can’t move back in-country with you to live on your grandmother’s estate. I can’t turn my back on the life I have so carefully fashioned for myself here. I can’t give up everything I’ve worked for to become your husband and the father of your children.”
“But—you never said—if it matters that much—well, we could find a way,” she said. Her face was both frightened and hopeful. She looked like a child trying to reason her way out of a nightmare. “Lots of families have homes in the city and homes in the country, and they move between them—if you only had to work four or six months a year—”
“It’s not just the work,” he said as gently as he could. “It’s the life. Nothing about it matters to me. All that talk of who marries whom—what heiress has received what property—it’s central to your existence, but I don’t care about it. I don’t like those people. I don’t want to be with those people.”
“You don’t want to be with me,” she whispered.
“Up until a month or so ago,” he said, “I was the right man for you, and you were the only woman who had ever mattered to me. It had not occurred to me those things could change. It’s not just that we want different things. It’s that I have become a different man. To marry you—to live with you—would be false. To both of us. You deserve someone who comes to you with a whole heart.”
“You’ve fallen in love with someone else.”
“That’s only part of it,” he said.
“That’s the only part I need to know.” All this time, she had kept his hand in hers, but now she released him, in a gesture both stately and final. She came to her feet, and he followed suit, feeling as if there had not been enough sentences between them for him to explain what he truly meant.
“There’s so much to tell you,” he began, “but so much I don’t know how to put into wor
ds.”
She held up one hand as if to enjoin silence and moved back from him a pace or two. Her face was so stony he was sure she was holding back tears, but she moved with all her usual grace and dignity. “At times like this,” she said, “words are the most harmful things in the world. The less you say, the less I’ll have to remember.”
He stood still a moment, trying to think of a response to that, but it was clear all she wanted from him was an exit. He made a small bow, a quaint acknowledgement of her unexpressed desire, and moved toward the door. On the threshold he paused, and turned back toward her.
“Yours is the spirit that formed me more than any other,” he told her. “When I think of the last fifteen years of my life, everything will be colored by you. You taught me only the sweeter aspects of love. I never knew, till others told me, that love also can be careless and cruel. What I have become is something you would not want, but I did not become that because of anything you have done. Had I been given a choice about it, I would have remained who I was, and faithful to you. And I will always love you for the beauty you brought to my life.”
She listened, but nothing about her softened. “None of that helps,” she said in a forlorn voice, and turned her back on him. He waited a moment longer in silence, then left the room. That would be, he thought, the last time in his life he would ever see her.
* * *
* * *
He told no one about his farewell with Leesa, but somehow everyone knew. He received a letter from his mother, filled with baffled recrimination, and one from his sister, filled with some of the harshest language anyone had ever addressed to him. At work, he caught a few sidelong glances of pity or rebuke from his indigo coworkers, depending on their own level of happiness in their relationships, and Melina took him out to lunch again.
